Let us try to understand what the left is doing with its political practice.
I maintain that politics is all about protection. The only warrant for government is existential peril, meaning usually that "our people" are threatened by some invader and conqueror. A people thus threatened are going to coalesce around some leader that promises to protect them from the invader.
When I say "our people" I invoke my theory of "fake tribalism" from my reading of H.R. Hallpike in How We Got Here and On Primitive Society. Hallpike represents modern anthropology as finding that tribalism is a new human invention. The hunter-gatherers didn't have it; members of a hunter-gatherer band that got into an argument with their brothers would just leave and join another band. Tribalism didn't really start until humans started living in villages where they didn't all know each other, and started to coalesce into groups of "we" that protected each other against some "they" in the village. Human tribalism is a recent phenomenon, that probably goes back a mere 15,000 years, max.
In other words, humans in villages that exceeded about 2,500 inhabitants organized themselves exactly like a modern city of immigrants that sorts itself out into ethnic neighborhoods. So I interpret the ethnic neighborhoods of modern cities as people of a previous political entity coming together in a strange land for self-protection.
So I maintain that if you are a would-be leader your task is to define a threat and organize an "our people" to fight that threat. Equally, if you are a group of people that find yourselves under threat then you need to find a leader and a means to forge common identity and interest and use that as a basis for organizing a new tribe.
I propose that the formation of nation states in Europe was a response to a threat, that if the groups of principalities in an area did not combine into a nation then they would be vulnerable to conquest and domination by the neighbor that was so organized.
I argue that the fundamental invention of the left is to convert this notion into organization of sub-national tribes. Thus Marx proposed the tribe of "the workers" that needed to combine under the leadership of vanguard intellectuals and activists in order to avoid being annihilated -- "immiserated" --by bourgeois capitalist predators. I am not arguing here about whether Marx was right in his analysis, but that he certainly succeeded in persuading a bunch of people that he was right.
Notice that there are two possibilities for the emergence of a tribe of "the workers." First would be the spontaneous eruption of a sense of threat among the workers resulting in a search for a leader to protect them. The other possibility is for someone wanting to lead the workers reaching out to them and teaching them to experience themselves as a group under threat.
In my judgment the spontaneous organization of the workers would only occur in a period when the workers were experiencing serious existential peril, such a decline in their industry that would encourage their employers to cut wage rates, or in a general economic crisis. The first kind of action has historically occurred in riots of "saboteurs," or workers making "sabots," or in the riots of agricultural workers in England during the "Captain Swing" riots in the 1820s when landless agricultural laborers were finding themselves replaced by threshing machines. A general economic crisis involving universal suffering tended, in olden times to involve "bread riots," or the lower orders looting food to stay alive.
Leftists have amended and extended the Marxian notion into a general politics of victimhood, in which well-born activists scour the world for a new victim class to represent. This usually involves actual outreach by the activist in question and "raising the consciousness" of the individuals in the target group to teach them how they are victims and how political action would improve their situation. In other words, activists do not wait for people to discover their oppression; it is the job of the activist to discover oppression and then organize the oppressed into a political movement. This was the script being followed by "community organizer" Barack Obama when he went as a young man to South Chicago to organize the laid-off steelworkers there.
Of interest is whether the well-born activist actually helps. Does he identify a problem? Is it a problem that politics can help rectify? Does he propose a solution that would actually help? Will his solution help long-term, or only short-term? And how would he or anyone else know?
We shall return to investigate various left-wing organizing attempts and see whether leftism works.
I maintain that politics is all about protection. The only warrant for government is existential peril, meaning usually that "our people" are threatened by some invader and conqueror. A people thus threatened are going to coalesce around some leader that promises to protect them from the invader.
When I say "our people" I invoke my theory of "fake tribalism" from my reading of H.R. Hallpike in How We Got Here and On Primitive Society. Hallpike represents modern anthropology as finding that tribalism is a new human invention. The hunter-gatherers didn't have it; members of a hunter-gatherer band that got into an argument with their brothers would just leave and join another band. Tribalism didn't really start until humans started living in villages where they didn't all know each other, and started to coalesce into groups of "we" that protected each other against some "they" in the village. Human tribalism is a recent phenomenon, that probably goes back a mere 15,000 years, max.
In other words, humans in villages that exceeded about 2,500 inhabitants organized themselves exactly like a modern city of immigrants that sorts itself out into ethnic neighborhoods. So I interpret the ethnic neighborhoods of modern cities as people of a previous political entity coming together in a strange land for self-protection.
So I maintain that if you are a would-be leader your task is to define a threat and organize an "our people" to fight that threat. Equally, if you are a group of people that find yourselves under threat then you need to find a leader and a means to forge common identity and interest and use that as a basis for organizing a new tribe.
I propose that the formation of nation states in Europe was a response to a threat, that if the groups of principalities in an area did not combine into a nation then they would be vulnerable to conquest and domination by the neighbor that was so organized.
I argue that the fundamental invention of the left is to convert this notion into organization of sub-national tribes. Thus Marx proposed the tribe of "the workers" that needed to combine under the leadership of vanguard intellectuals and activists in order to avoid being annihilated -- "immiserated" --by bourgeois capitalist predators. I am not arguing here about whether Marx was right in his analysis, but that he certainly succeeded in persuading a bunch of people that he was right.
Notice that there are two possibilities for the emergence of a tribe of "the workers." First would be the spontaneous eruption of a sense of threat among the workers resulting in a search for a leader to protect them. The other possibility is for someone wanting to lead the workers reaching out to them and teaching them to experience themselves as a group under threat.
In my judgment the spontaneous organization of the workers would only occur in a period when the workers were experiencing serious existential peril, such a decline in their industry that would encourage their employers to cut wage rates, or in a general economic crisis. The first kind of action has historically occurred in riots of "saboteurs," or workers making "sabots," or in the riots of agricultural workers in England during the "Captain Swing" riots in the 1820s when landless agricultural laborers were finding themselves replaced by threshing machines. A general economic crisis involving universal suffering tended, in olden times to involve "bread riots," or the lower orders looting food to stay alive.
Leftists have amended and extended the Marxian notion into a general politics of victimhood, in which well-born activists scour the world for a new victim class to represent. This usually involves actual outreach by the activist in question and "raising the consciousness" of the individuals in the target group to teach them how they are victims and how political action would improve their situation. In other words, activists do not wait for people to discover their oppression; it is the job of the activist to discover oppression and then organize the oppressed into a political movement. This was the script being followed by "community organizer" Barack Obama when he went as a young man to South Chicago to organize the laid-off steelworkers there.
Of interest is whether the well-born activist actually helps. Does he identify a problem? Is it a problem that politics can help rectify? Does he propose a solution that would actually help? Will his solution help long-term, or only short-term? And how would he or anyone else know?
We shall return to investigate various left-wing organizing attempts and see whether leftism works.
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